Gadfly

Another Great Wall

April 19th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

18 April 2021

What Are Our National Goals?

I imagine that every person who has lived as long as I have feels that they have lived in transformational times that may change the world. At 89, I get up each morning eager to get to the TV and computer to see what has happened in the 24-hour news cycle.

Sometimes I like what I see, sometimes I curse. Yesterday, in an article about aging, I saw that the odds I will not reach 90 is one in six. So today I hope I…

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Is Christianity in Limbo?

April 12th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Sam Harris: “At Some Point It’s Going to Be Too Embarrassing to Believe in God”

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Jerry Falwell, Sr., the leader of the Christian Right “Moral Majority,” blamed the attack on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who tried to secularize America.”

Such an attack aroused the interest of atheist intellectual Sam Harris, perhaps the leading critic of religions in the DSA,…

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Days of Race and Ethnics

April 4th, 2021

By Ed Raymond 

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Why Can’t Whites Jump?

In 1946 I graduated from Morrison County District #54 with two others, a German boy and a Polish girl. I’m French. I graduated from Little Falls High School in 1950 with 241 other lily-Whites. Oh, it’s possible that some might have had a drop of Black or Hispanic blood or two in their genome. The ethnics were more interesting. There were three Roman Catholic churches in town. The German and French were on the east side of…

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Death at the OK Corral, DSA

March 28th, 2021

The only cure for our firearm pandemic is to reduce our number of firearms to the rate held by the 37 most developed countries, limit their power and capacity, and track all ammunition.

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Why American Kids Need More School Active-Shooter Drills Than Fire Drills

The Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area has a population of about 250,000. The Divided States of America has 330 million. The best estimate of the number of usable firearms in the country is 425…

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Engine of Inequality

March 21st, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

21 January 2021

What Job Pays 90 Bucks an Hour and You Just Have to Keep Repeating “NO”?

There evidently is a great deal of truth in the old adage: “Those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it.” The Divided States of America are beginning to look more like the Roman Empire and the Vatican each day. The power of Rome grew and died over a thousand years because only sometimes it acted like a real empire.

Modern life is quicker and…

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WARNING! The Fascists Are Coming!!

March 15th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

The Only Way to Defeat Trumpistan Is to Pass the Democratic Party’s Platform

Since 2013, when Chief Justice John Roberts declared the election of Barack Obama had proven that racial discrimination no longer existed in the United States, the Republicans have closed 1,688 polling places.

Texas alone has closed 750 while Arizona and Georgia have closed hundreds in counties where there are lots of colored people. In Texas counties that had gained the most…

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Normal It Ain’t

March 8th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

08 March 2021

Dennis: “Why Did Jesus Turn Water Into Wine When He Could Have Changed It Into Chocolate Milk?”

As I listened to our resident Mara-Loco psychopath Donald Trump address his cult at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) emphasizing his “America First” white supremacist program and ranting about immigrants, I thought of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem about America and his second stanza written about a half-century ago:

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Dr. Frankenstein Built Another One

March 1st, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

28 February 2021

How Can We Reform Victims of Trumpism, QAnon, and the New Ku Klux Klan?

In a Hialeah, Florida grocery store, a Hispanic man asked a white woman standing behind him, in both Spanish and English, to move six feet from him as they stood waiting to check out. She ignored him and “mumbled bad words” at him.

Out in the parking lot, as he was putting groceries in his car, she came within one foot of his face, yelled: “This is not going to…

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Death of a Nation

February 23rd, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

21 February 2021

Have We Eliminated ‘The Giants Of Racism, Extreme Materialism, And Militarism’?

In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson saw the first American motion picture ever shown in the White House, “The Birth of a Nation,” based on the book “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon. Jr.It was a three-hour movie, part fiction and part history, covering the lives of the Northern pro-union Stonemans and the Southern pro-Confederacy Camerons.

I first saw…

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Analysis: It Can Happen Here

February 15th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

February 18, 2021

Maybe the Prophet Down on Interstate 94 Was Wrong

As a student of American literature, I have read some of Sinclair Lewis’s many books: Main Street, Babbit, Arrowsmith,Elmer Gantry, and It Can’t Happen Here come to mind. Born in Sauk Centre in 1885, Lewis was evidently a troublesome Minnesota teenager because he tried to run away from home at age 13 to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War (Philippines, Cuba, Guantanamo…

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